What will marketing look like in 2025, and why will neuromarketing play an important role in the future of the experience economy?
Let’s begin with the experience economy. Consumers require more than a great product. The experience of the entire customer journey, from initial engagement to interest to purchase and beyond, is an essential part of the product. The more unique and individualized the customer’s experience, the greater the value.
Over 86% of consumers say they are willing to pay more for exceptional customer experience. And it’s no wonder that 81% of businesses say that they expect to compete mostly or completely on the basis of customer experience.
Sure, the experience economy will continue to evolve, but the experiences customers want and expect from their purchases and brand engagements will continue to drive consumer behavior into the foreseeable future.
What does the experience economy become? Perhaps the values economy, with Gen Z coming into economic maturity, and consumers make more purchasing choices based on the stand a particular company or brand takes on issues such as social justice and humanitarian issues as well as environmental responsibility.
Competitive advantage in the experience economy
Knowing and understanding the needs, wants, and desires of your customers continue to be the most sought-after marketing superpower.
Brands must find new ways to delight consumers and create unique and lasting emotional experiences. Creative marketing and traditional marketing research can go a long way, but as competition intensifies, market share will go to those with the most advanced tools for gaining deeper, more accurate, and actionable insights into consumer desires and emotions. And the law of business survival will remain the same as always: Adapt or die.
The digital transformation continues to revolutionize how life is done. AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things have been grafted into nearly every aspect of what we do and who we are. The ability to gather massive amounts of data about anything, everything, and everyone, combined with the tools to conduct complex data analysis for making sense of that information has enabled companies to disrupt, innovate, and change the economic landscape.
Understanding customer attitudes, feelings, needs, and behaviors have informed strategies for improving customer experiences and giving businesses a competitive edge.
With technology developing at exponential speed across sectors, industries, and disciplines, the advances in one area can offer new insights and approaches in seemingly unrelated industries.
Neuromarketing is neither as old, nor as new as it might seem
Neuroscience has made huge advances in understanding human brain function in the last decade. Brain scan technologies have allowed researchers to pinpoint real-time brain activity in response to a stimulus. Comparing those results with what they know about brain function indicates what kind of response an advertisement provokes in the participant’s brain.
Marketers can test their marketing campaigns and triangulate testing methods such as focus groups, surveys, and others with the information gathered from brain scans. Neuroscience and behavioral economics have teamed up to confirm and inform marketing strategies with greater accuracy and effectiveness.
Neuromarketing is neither as old nor as new as it might seem. Yes, attempting to appeal to basic human drives and emotional decision-making processes has been Marketing 101 forever.
Also, neuromarketing has been discussed since around 2002-04. However, interest in neuromarketing has grown alongside advances in neuroscience and the development of marketing technology. While neuroscience was making continued progress, digital marketing tools were catching up, and can now effectively gather and manage data as well as integrate new outside information.
Digital marketing tools are a two-way street, sending your brand message to target audiences through a variety of channels, and also gathering data provided by consumers through email, social media, apps, and any relevant data from third-party sources. This makes intelligent marketing solutions into a dynamic system that continually monitors and updates, making improvements to marketing and branding efforts as well as building a single, unified view of the customer in a real-time responsive profile. Integrating neuromarketing data into this system is now a possibility that did not exist only five years ago at the level it is today and looking forward to marketing in 2025.
Emotional experience influences customer lifetime value
Designing memorable experiences with the aid of neuromarketing insights will take marketing to the next level. New dimensions of emotional experience can be designed into every engagement with your brand, building and reinforcing the positive brand associations that become lifetime customer loyalty and increased CLV.
Strategies to engage the five senses, trip emotional triggers, and careful management of cues in experience design have been part of traditional marketing forever. Some see neuroscience confirming traditional marketing knowledge as evidence that neuromarketing is no better than the standby marketing methods. However, since neuromarketing is still maturing and developing, these seem more like signs of forward progress.
An additional promise of neuromarketing insights come in guidelines for engaging the senses and the intuitive, instinctual reactions hardwired into the human central nervous system and brain functions. Marketers can learn which cues to use or avoid in certain contexts. Knowing which colors or fonts will make marketing strategies more effective for getting and keeping consumer attention, and then converting interest into sales.
By learning in even greater and more segmented detail what their customers want, need, and expect, companies marketing in 2025 who leverage neuromarketing insights will have a major competitive advantage in the experience economy. With this deep understanding of their customers and the power of digital tools such as AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things, businesses can deliver the best possible customer experiences at an unprecedented speed and scale of personalization and individualization.
